<img height="1" width="1" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=610419235832899&ev=PageView &noscript=1"/>

Orkney Days

An Island Life

by Christine Muir

£9.99

Available Formats:
Add to Basket
ISBN: 9781839830945
Published: 21 Aug 2025
Format: Paperback
Extent: 208
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
Imprint: Origin
Categories:
Local history
  • Share:

About the Book

This is the charming and poignant account of twenty-five years spent in Orkney. After her marriage to an islander, Christine Muir went to live on the tiny island of North Ronaldsay, where she and her husband brought up their four children and ran a small croft.

Following the seasons though the year, Orkney Days is full of observations of the natural world at their doorstep. Beautiful descriptions of the island and its flora and fauna – from wildflowers and medicinal herbs to seals and seabirds – are mingled with memories of a young family growing up and the rhythms of daily life far from the bustle of the modern world. There is much too about the work involved in running their croft and the cattle and sheep that are its mainstay, about the traditions and lore of the island which stretch back over countless generations, and about the modern developments which changed it forever.


The Author

Christine Muir

Christine Muir was born in Leith. She started writing for Farmers Weekly in 1966 and later contributed columns to The Scotsman.

You may also like…

  • Hardback | Pub: 03 Oct 2024
    £25.00

    Shortlisted for The Wolfson History Prize. Discover the true story of St. Kilda. When the last 36 inhabitants of St Kilda, 40 miles west of the Scottish Hebrides, were evacuated in 1930, the archipelago at ‘the edge of the world’ lost its...

  • Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021
    £12.99

    First published in 1969, An Orkney Tapestry, George Mackay Brown’s seminal work, is a unique look at Orkney through the eye of a poet. Originally commissioned by his publisher as an introduction to the Orkney Islands, Brown approached the...

  • Paperback | Pub: 06 Oct 2022
    £10.99

    ‘Magnificent’ – New Statesman, Books of the Year Fourteen centuries ago, Irish saints journeyed to the Hebrides and Scotland’s Atlantic shore. They sought spiritual solitude in remote places, but their mission was also to...

  • Paperback | Pub: 12 Mar 2015
    £10.99

    Orkney lies only 20 miles north of mainland Scotland, yet for many centuries its culture was more Scandanavian than Scottish. Strong westerly winds account for the scarcity of trees on Orkney and also for the tradition of well-constructed stone...